Kingdom of Strangers (20 page)

Five minutes later Jo came back into the room. To Katya she said, “I’m sorry. I just can’t stand this.” She motioned to the television. “It never stops.”

“It’s horrible.” Katya didn’t want to tell her that there were even worse things than beatings. That among the police records, nearly 60 percent of unidentified murder victims were female housemaids. And that they had just found another nineteen.

“This color looks beautiful on you,” Jo said. “Have a look.”

Katya spun to the mirror again. “I like the color,” she said, “but the chest is too frilly.”

Jo nodded and went back to the spare fitting room, where she’d hung another dozen dresses.

In between gowns number four and five, Katya sneaked to the front window, which was blocked from the street by heavy black curtains. She drew the curtain aside and peered out.

It was dark and the shopping area outside was lit with hundreds of golden string lights and a giant star-shaped lantern. Standing directly beneath the lantern, Nayir and Ayman were sipping juice and talking. Ayman said something that made Nayir
throw his head back and let out a belly laugh.
Mash’allah
, he was the best cousin she could hope for.

As she dropped the curtains and drew back into the store, she felt a sting of… envy? Sadness? She would never be able to make Nayir laugh like that. With her, he was always delicate, protected.

It took an hour, switching in and out of different dresses. Katya might have enjoyed it, but Jo’s anger clipped her movements. The girls had gone silent. Katya gave in to the mood and listened as Jo began to relieve herself of tormented thoughts. Earlier that year, it seemed suicide was the thing. One housemaid had tried to hang herself, another swallowed detergent, a third had jumped from the roof of her building. Not nearly as bad as the woman whose employer had hammered twenty-four hot nails into her face, hands, and arms. (That was a year ago in August.) Or the girl in Abha whose employer beat, burned, stabbed her, and then cut off her lips. (November.) Not to mention two unidentified bodies found the next month (well, the two that made the news).

In January, the story was a little different—and gave Jo cause for some hope, late though it was. A Saudi woman had been sentenced to three years in prison for her violations on the November girl. Thanks to the new laws that had been passed, this was finally possible.

But only a few weeks later, a housemaid was arrested for using “sorcery” against her employer and his family—or so the employer claimed. (February.) Then a girl who jumped from a third-floor balcony to escape her employers was found to have been brutally beaten and burned. (March.) Jo ticked off the remaining months, rushing right up to this evening’s installment: October.

Katya had never known an unhappy housemaid. Overworked and frazzled, yes. Annoyed by loud children, definitely. But abused? No. And yet today, every housemaid she encountered was dead or badly mutilated or both. She told herself that this was because she worked for the police.

Slowly, Jo’s vitriol began to spread outward; not content to list crimes, she began to blame the entire country.

“You people let your men tell their women every little thing they can and cannot do. It’s the same with employers. They’re allowed to tell a housemaid anything, and she has to do it!”

Katya realized her silence was now being mistaken for complicity. She wanted to leave. She didn’t want to buy a dress anymore—there weren’t any good ones here anyway.

She looked at her watch. “Oh no, I’ve got to go! My cousin will be angry.”

The three women looked at her with disappointment. Was she, too, simply a woman on a leash?

Katya got dressed and slid into her
abaaya
. “Thank you so much for your time,” she said and scurried out the door.

Nayir was walking as slowly as possible to enjoy every single moment he could catch with her. Katya’s cousin Ayman had wandered off, talking on his phone, and for now Nayir had her to himself. The best parts of their relationship so far had occurred during walks like this on the Corniche. He had even proposed marriage in a restaurant not far from here.

It was evening, and as far as Jeddawis were concerned, the day was properly beginning. It was finally cool enough to be outside. For Nayir, the darkness added an extra layer of privacy. No sun to shine through a woman’s cloak and outline her figure. No stark illumination of the exposed faces that women seemed to prefer more and more. And those women who forsook headscarves completely—from a distance it seemed that each one’s hair was a veil. It was more common now to see families picnicking on the sidewalks with their teenage daughters romping freely, wearing jeans and T-shirts and looking as mannish as their brothers—
some even with short hair. The feeling that suffused him in the presence of it all was one of inexplicable sadness and loss.

With a sigh he let it go, and it wound like a single, frail cloud into the dark sky. He was going to be married to this beautiful woman walking beside him. Soon he would do what his body had wanted to do since the first time he saw her: scoop her up like the small thing she was and kiss her face a hundred times and curl his body around her, naked and full of bliss. As he walked beside her, smelling the warmth of her hair and neck, every particle inside him that was capable of feeling was lit up like a star.

So much of his life seemed foreign to him now. After she had agreed to marry him, that day on his boat, he’d gone below, and the interior of the yacht, which he’d lived in for years, seemed different—small and dank, full of artifacts from dreams that had died long ago. Maps and navigation manuals left over from his fantasy of sailing the world alone. Business cards from men at the camel market—a reminder that he had once wanted to buy camels and spend long months in the desert with the Bedouins. It surprised him how easily he had accepted the death of these dreams. And now he was eager to move into what was new. To sign the marriage document. To make it real. This urgency was also driven by the memory of what had happened with Fatimah, who had ripped him up by the roots and thrown him aside. He was terrified that this engagement would end the same way: suddenly and with helpless fury. Only this would be more brutal. He had so much more invested. The fear thrummed deep in his chest, occasionally racing like hummingbird wings, and he swallowed it hard, clawed it back.
Get away from the bloom in my heart
.

The thing was, all that was good was more dazzling than ever, but all that was bad came with a terrific shock. He had never known jealousy so charged. It could stop his heart. When Katya talked about her job, he tried to take comfort from the good she
was doing for society, but at times he nearly died with the thought of every man she talked to, the men who saw her face, who spent entire days having access to her that he couldn’t. On his knees at the mosque, he’d lost whole
du’as
being distracted by disgust for his fellow men. He thought of them all: Men who leaped out of their cars to harass single women walking down the street. Men who sneaked into women’s shopping malls dressed like women so they could prey on young girls. Men who Bluetoothed naked photos of themselves to anyone in a sixty-foot radius; pompous pectorals appeared on his cell phone, the peacock feathers of the modern teenage boy. He was determined to control this fury. When he came back to his senses, he prayed for forgiveness, prayed that no matter what vulgar temptations got thrown in her path, Katya would love him with her own single-minded passion.

“I need a wall,” she said.

“Pardon me?”

“A big, blank wall.” She sighed, and he stole a glance at her face. It wore preoccupation, defiance. “I managed to get copies of all the photographs of the dead bodies. There are nineteen of them, remember? I need somewhere to hang them all in the positions in which they were found.”

He wanted to ask why the investigators hadn’t done that already. But of course they wouldn’t want pictures of women’s naked bodies displayed on their walls unless it was absolutely necessary. And perhaps it wasn’t.

“Majdi—you remember him? The head of forensics. You met him that one time. He’s already created a computer model of the site that’s true to geographical detail,” she said. “But it’s kind of flat and meaningless. I think it’s best to do this the old-fashioned way.”

He tried to understand. Who better to look at photographs of women’s bodies than a woman? “I have a wall for you,” he said.

She immediately shook her head. “Your boat is far too small.”

“I was thinking of my uncle’s house.”

“Oh. That’s very sweet, but we couldn’t. They’re graphic photos of dead women. You probably won’t want to look at them yourself.”

“It won’t bother me or my uncle,” he said. “We won’t look at the photos if that’s what you want.”

“No, no, it’s not that—”

“We have a wall.”

An hour later, they were standing in Samir’s basement.

Katya had never met Samir before. Although he was Nayir’s only family, she had not heard that much about him except that he had raised Nayir by himself, without a woman’s help. Perhaps for that reason, he’d seemed mysterious. Had he cooked? Changed diapers? Sung lullabies and read stories and held Nayir on his lap when he cried? She imagined a chubby, effeminate man who watched soaps every day sitting on a tatty sofa in the same house robe he’d worn for thirty years.

The real Samir was stocky but graceful. He wore a pair of shiny leather loafers, a suit with a vest, and a dark green ascot tucked into his collar. It was nearly nine o’clock when they arrived at his door, and he answered looking very much like a butler, his gray hair glimmering in the golden light of his foyer.

He smiled at Katya in a way that was understated but beaming somehow with an inner excitement. He welcomed the three of them and sent Nayir to prepare tea and dates while he escorted their guests to the empty wall.

Samir was a chemist like her father, but where Abu had spent his life working in factories and universities, Samir had remained independent. He worked out of his basement, doing freelance projects for archaeologists and the occasional historian, conducting his own research into anything that interested him, the details
of which he assured her were boring. He kept his equipment in a basement laboratory. Katya and Ayman were standing there now. It was brightly lit and spacious, and the cool air was a relief. Ayman grinned.

“Will this be enough space for your photographs?” Samir motioned to the wall at the back of the house.

“More than enough,” she said. “However, perhaps I should do this myself. The images are graphic.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve seen crime scene photos before. I’ve even unearthed dead bodies myself, at archaeological digs. I know what to expect. Unless you’d prefer us to leave?”

“No, you’re welcome to stay. I just wanted to warn you.”

“Well, don’t worry. I won’t be offended, and I’d be glad to assist. The more eyes, the better.” Samir glanced at Ayman, who shrugged affably, trying to look adult. He was hoping that Katya wouldn’t force him to leave. He was only nineteen and inclined to get grilled by Katya’s father about her whereabouts.

She took the photos from her bag and began to hang them up. Samir oversaw the operation, guiding her from the map. They had just finished the last photo when Nayir entered with a tea tray. The look of quiet dismay on his face made her feel ashamed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I probably should have warned you we were hanging them now.”

“It’s all right,” he replied, setting the tray on a workbench. At least he hadn’t said
I’ll keep my gaze pure
. How many times had she heard that ridiculous phrase? It meant that a man could look at something scandalous—a woman’s naked arm, her hair, her neck—and choose not to see it because his mind was pure.

Once the photos were up, Katya felt ridiculous. Now what?

She had already noticed from the map that the bodies had been buried in a circular formation, with twelve bodies on the outer edge and seven filling up the middle.

“Well, it’s a circle,” Ayman said.

“Technically, it’s a hexagon,” Samir replied. “In fact, a very carefully shaped hexagon.”

“Does it mean anything?” Ayman asked.

“I don’t know,” Samir said. “What do you think?”

Katya glanced at Nayir. He was staring at the photos with a look of quiet horror.

“It’s the shape of a honeycomb?” Ayman said.

“Hmm, yes.”

They fell quiet. Katya realized that she hadn’t really needed a wall as much as she needed a crime team who was familiar with the case.

“What are these crosses on the map?” Samir asked.

“Those mark the spots where they found the hands,” Katya said. “The victims’ hands were cut off.”

“Only three of them?” Samir asked.

“No, all of the victims’ hands were cut off, but they only found three of them buried at the site.”

“And the other hands, where are they?”

“We have no idea.”

Samir took a marker from a jar on the desk and placed a small cross on each of the photos to show where they had found the hands.

“But how peculiar that only three should be buried!” Samir said, still looking at the map.

They fell into an even more maudlin silence. Nayir, who had poured everyone a cup of tea, was the only one who had actually picked up his cup. He leaned against the desk and sipped his tea.

“The bodies,” he said. Everyone turned. It was a surprise to hear him speak. “They’re oddly positioned.”

“It looks like the killer just dumped them there,” Katya said.

“So this killer takes a great deal of time plotting out a hexagonal burial pattern, and then he simply tosses the bodies into their graves?” Nayir asked. “They’re all buried in haphazard positions.”

“You’re right,” Samir said. “That is odd.” He turned to the
wall and Nayir stood up, both seeming to come to something at the same moment. “Can it be?” Samir said.

Nayir set his cup on the desk, took the pen from Samir, and went to the wall. “There is a pattern. Do you see it?”

She was staring frantically at the photos. “No. What?”